Grand Chain

Where can I find Scottish Country Dancing

An obvious starting point is the the RSCDS, the
umbrella society for Scottish Country Dancing. It's also a start, and they have
comprehensive contacts for all branches in the
world, including web sites for those branches which have them. But addresses are very dry, so we
keep looking.

We reach Anselm Lingnau's Strathspey
web site,. This site was probably the first major web site for SCD, and is the home page of the
Strathspey mailing list, including a comprehensive archive of postings to that list. More on this
later. Anselm also has links to other interesting pages.

Among these is Alan Paterson's DanceData database.
He has combined various dance indexes and produced a database program which allows you to find all
the details on each dance, find all the dances devised by a certain person/in a certain book/with
a given tune/containing certain formations/... So you could do a search for all 3-couple jigs devised
by Roy Goldring which contain reels of four (there are three). Or you could ask who devised The Mercat
Cross ... and find there are four dances by that name. Or... You can either download the program from
Alan's web site or go to the Strathspey web site and use Anselm's web front-end. If you want to know
which tune goes to a dance (or vice versa), you can also ask Peter Hastings' index,
hosted on
Strathspey.

Okay, we've found where to get dance books, but what about dance instructions on the web? They ar
harder to come by. Don't expect to find standard dances - as well as breaking copyright, the online
dance community felt this would discourage people from publishing on paper, and hence discriminate
against those who don't have access to the web - but there are a few groups who are starting to
publish new dances on the web. Oberdan Otto has an index,
and there is also a list of such
collections on the Grand Chain web site. Grand Chain also has
some of the more common ceilidh dances
on the site.

But enough of static information - how about meeting some of the other dancers on the web? You want
a mailing list. These provide a central email address which people can use to contact everyone on
the list - all mail sent to that address is forwarded to all the list members, who can then reply
(to everyone). Different lists have different characters, from dry lists which just contain
announcements to lively discussion groups which ramble about from topic to topic; the list is
whatever its members make it.

The Strathspey list is anything but quiet. This is the mailing list if you want to ask
questions of / share views with Scottish country dancers all around the world. Topics covered
lately have included warm-ups, slip-stop, SCD-related number-plates (no-one has yet spotted R 5 CDS,
but there was an RSCDS in the US, as well as 8X32R, and many others), and
terms which can be used
for common dancing figures where there is no standard term (fishhooks and butterflies were among
the more picturesque options proposed). If you want to know exactly where to be on bar 18¾ in the
dance Glowerin' O'er a Dyke, ask on Strathspey, and you'll get half a dozen conflicting answers.
If that's not you, join anyway and skip to the interesting mails. To join, send an email to
strathspey-subscribe@strathspey.org.
If you want to see what has been discussed previously, go to
the Strathspey web site where there is a
searchable archive.

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